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I got the steam user survey for the first time this month, I have been using steam since the earliest linux betas. I suspect this is a random sampling thing. I don't think the sample numbers are far wrong. Many linux users either dual boot or use wine because the games they want to play are not available. I have avoided doing that, but I don't think it is all that common.

This alone should end this bullshit. Doesn't Michael know the polls are bull?

So, a single user posting a "bug report" is enough proof that the survey is broken? The number of users on Steam is huge. The number of users that are randomly selected is small. The chance of being selected therefore very low. I've been using Steam for 8+ years now. I've been surveyed three times during all those years (and one of these was on Linux, so Linux polls do happen).

Canceling the poll and changing the OS is probably detected, to keep people from willfully manipulating the poll by changing to their OS of choice before taking the survey. I would say what is being reported as a bug is actually a feature to prevent people from "cheating".

I run windows and linux and I got polled on Linux this time. Its not baised, you get polled on whatever OS your on at the time you get selected to poll. I spend >90% of my time on linux, so it makes sense that it was very likely that I was on linux at the time of polling. Statistics.

Why do people call things biased if they don't agree with them? Its like dealing with the climate change deniers.

Because of all of the cases where users have use Steam almost exclusively on Linux but never get the survey, but that one time they log in on Windows or in Wine they get polled and counted toward Windows.

They should remove all ambiguity and just collect the OS and hardware string on login for every user over the last 30 days. Then just go with what was used most often over that month.

Why does it "randomly" select people if it's supposed to survey how many people are using what? It should ask everyone.

Because randomly selecting a large enough sample produces (almost) the same result as asking everyone (e.g ±1%). However, it is a lot faster and produces a lot less data. This is called a "representative survey". For some it might make a difference if the percentage of Linux gamers is 0.9%, 1% or 1.1% (or even 2%) but ultimately it doesn't matter. Who cares if Windows, in total, owns 95% or 94.9% of the market. It's undeniably the most used platform so publishers will continue to target that platform. Don't fool yourself thinking that Linux would suddenly have a much larger share (e.g. 20%) if only the survey where "more fair".

Because randomly selecting a large enough sample produces (almost) the same result as asking everyone (e.g ±1%). However, it is a lot faster and produces a lot less data. This is called a "representative survey". For some it might make a difference if the percentage of Linux gamers is 0.9%, 1% or 1.1% (or even 2%) but ultimately it doesn't matter. Who cares if Windows, in total, owns 95% or 94.9% of the market. It's undeniably the most used platform so publishers will continue to target that platform. Don't fool yourself thinking that Linux would suddenly have a much larger share (e.g. 20%) if only the survey where "more fair".

The sweet spot for AAA companies to take notice of your platform is at 4% of the market, so while nobody cares what percentage Windows is at it does in fact matter a great deal for Mac and Linux users if they want their OS to be better supported.

Also, with 50 million users its quite possible for a random sample of even 5 million to return 100% of users using Windows.

Thus it's best to remove all ambiguity and get everyone's data that has logged in via their client over the last month.

[..]
Also, with 50 million users its quite possible for a random sample of even 5 million to return 100% of users using Windows.
[..]

Not really...

If you have 1% Linux users, the probability to draw a Windows user is 0.99 = 99%.
If you draw two users, the probability for both to be Windows user is 0.99^2 = 98,01%.
If you draw 1000 users, the probability for all of them to be Windows users is 0.99^1000 = ~0,0043%.
For 5 million, it's ~0% and not "quite possible"...